All That Matters

By: Wayson Choy

Release Date: 2004

Publisher: Anchor Canada/Random House

www.randomhouse.ca

420 Pages/Fiction

ISBN: 0-385-25777-5

Softcover: $21.00

Gillar Prize Finalist 

4 ½ Stars 

Reviewed By: Kindah Mardam Bey 

Peel back the spine to Wayson Choy’s second book of fiction and you will feel the delicate flow of words pour off the page and enter into your personal aura….or at least, that’s what it feels like. Gliding off the pages are narrative, storytelling and elegant exposition that reveals the true heart of a Chinese-Canadian immigrant. More than that, All That Matters is a universal telling of any person from one particular cultural group transplanting upon another. Whether it be Chinese moving to Canada, Arabians moving to Switzerland or Bermudans moving to Russia, All That Matters would hit the core of any one of those experiences. Compelled to reading the first few pages to my Mother, a British immigrant to Canada once upon a time, a particular passage struck her. Young Kiam-Kim (the main character of All That Matters), in 1926, is being propped up by the ship’s railing by his father and looking at the vastness of the water; so too had my Mother that same moment of wonder over thirty years later on a ship bound for Canada. How many millions of others will have had that same moment encapsulated into print by Wayson Choy in All That Matters? 

As mentioned, central character Kiam-Kim is destined for the ‘Gold Mountain’ of Canada, known as Vancouver, from China at the age of three. With his father and grandmother who is called Poh-Poh (The Old One), and Kiam-Kim immigrate to Canada with falsified papers by a man they are to call Third Uncle – basically adopt a family and have them work for you, allowing them the access of living in a new country. The 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act instigated a lot of this falsifying of documentation and lineage; as Chinese were considered ‘aliens’ and somewhat unwanted in Canada at the time of the early 1920s.  

What is so compelling about All That Matters, is that it is the sequel to Wayson Choy’s first book The Jade Peony, but all those experiences in the first book are told by the eldest sibling of the Chen family in the sequel. Choy manages to make the story ‘unknown territory’ and the anticipation of events from The Jade Peony in its sequel seems to take a backseat compared to the unexpected twists and turns in All That Matters. If you have read The Jade Peony first, the second book seems to lull the reader into predicament, but then enlighten the reader into a different perspective on that event. As the reader realizes, so is it true in book families as real families, that everyone has their own perceptions on their childhoods.  

All That Matters is also a detailed account of Chinese immigrants in the 30s and 40s, perhaps better for the simply laid out perceptions of a youth in that era. We see those who built the railway, now out of work and starving, we see an ugly underbelly to Canada that is the fault of no one, and yet many could be blamed for the poor quality of living many immigrants experienced early on.  All That Matters is a cross-cultural microcosm established to examine the ancient dichotomy between the merit of traditionalism amidst the ever changing landscape of modernism. What is inescapable about All That Matters, is simply that tradition is inescapable and more importantly, worth honouring.  A vibrant recognition that prejudice lives in all of us, sometimes as a preservation of ones own culture; ultimately, we must learn to coexist with our pasts and with ourselves. This is a compelling read, with more layers than an onion. I suspect All That Matters will be as relevant a piece of literature to Canada as Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior is to the United States. 
 

Read More About Wayson Choy